I Will Show You The Life Of The Mind (On Prescription Drugs)

A choose-your-own-adventure poetry collection. Taking on the human brain, the concept of mind and the affect of prescription meds on those things, butting up against the banalities of contemporary British life and interactions with the NHS.

“From the mysterious recesses of the mind (or is that brain?) comes the urge to fix our sadness! Drugs are the answer, allied with literature. Legal, prescribed drugs, by hurried doctors, which reroute synapses in millions of human beings consciousnesses. What is the poetry of this ubiquitous but hidden malforming of the already overblown 21st human mental experience? In England, of all places? Who knows?! But SJ Fowler’s inventive espousing of fiction, poetry, illustration and found-text, as one singular literary undertaking, offers up the mess and hope of searching. A choose-your-own-adventure novel into the pits of your cognisance, this truly original book of confusion and consolation, as generously vulnerable as it is challenging, is by turns sad, funny, abstract and painfully clear. What emerges is YOU: the writer, the reader, the patient, the doctor, the doubt and decision, and how to newly express this, a life of the mind…on prescription drugs.”

www.stevenjfowler.com/iwillshowyou

“I had other books on the go when I started this, but they’re having to wait. Reading it sequentially first time round, on finishing I headed straight back in, following the various threads and returning to favourite passages to draw what more I could out of them. While published in conventional book format, ‘I will show you the life of the mind...’ throws up similar challenges as BS Johnson does in his ‘The Unfortunates’ - if you’re willing to accept them and approach the text in a sequence of your own choosing - and, as I’ve been dipping into that for at least a couple of decades, I expect this one to be another that sticks around. Another point to mention is that I’ve spent a good deal of time in hospitals and doctors’ surgeries the last couple of years, both as a patient and as a visitor, and so my reaction is also a very personal one. SJ Fowler is so good on the strange relationships, the attempts at bargaining and the emotions that build up while you’re going through the medical mill - “You go back to the doctors to see your regular doctor, your friend doctor. They are nicer but they concur with the other doctor.” How familiar that feels, that awkward mix of the personal and professional during an extended period of treatment. And, finally, I’ve read a good deal of experimental poetry and not much of it makes me laugh. This does. Repeatedly.” Jonathan Brooker